Robin Malau Dot Com - Rockstar now Geek

I’ve been messing up with dozens of Wordpress Themes, either for my own blogs and lately for my client’s blogs. Lately i’ve been experimenting by converting a CSS template into Wordpress template. When i finished my first template, i was like, OMG i can make a wordpress template by my own, but then, i found out that some plugins are just not working in my template, especially PodPress.

By doing a simple Google Search i found this post by Wordpress Expert who can answer my question. A plugin friendly Wordpress template must include the following codes:

1. Header

Can you find these codes before the </head> closing tag?

<?php wp_head(); ?>

2. Sidebar

Find these codes in the “Meta” section of your sidebar:

<?php wp_meta(); ?>

3. Comments

Try to find this before the </form> closing tag:

<?php wp_meta(); ?>

4. Footer

Look for these codes at the bottom of your theme

<?php wp_footer(); ?>

From my own theme as an example, after i snipped these codes at its places, the theme is going alright with any kind of plugins that i install, especially the very cool PodPress plugin.

I am not more than another Obey Giant’s a.k.a. Shepard Fairey t’shirt collector (by far i have 7 of them) among other cool brands, but to evangelist his work is always fun. This time, Obey come up with this fine print art products which is so very cool. The print art available in 3 colors and my favorite is this one below. Why? Because i found the color scheme is so Obey if you know what i’m saying. The freaking cool version of the print is the Red one, because it includes 3D glasses.

You can find this super cool print art at ToyRoom.

Via Juxtapoz.

Weird. I’ve been celebrating my birthdays for 35 times. Never been a fan of fancy birthdays, in fact i’ve never agree that a birthday is a special day until i met my wife. At least, i still believe that celebrating birthdays is beyond than just a reason to celebrate life. Today, i got 2 happy birthday text messages, 2 emails and some automated greetings from social networking sites.

Back in my music days, in this date, i will get like 300 text messages, and even greater when i was leading a company with hundreds of employees. But since i work at home starting last month, and i’ve decided to explore my inner geek, so i practically stop doing communal communalities thing and somehow ‘losing’ my  old friends.

I admit, this is not the most fancy birthday for me but strangely enough, i think this will be my most memorable birthday because this is the first time i actually celebrate my birthday.

Here’s some cool moments of today, and how our 9 month daughter Brooklyn steal the headline for most of the time :-D:

1. My wife was the first to say Happy Birthday, while Brooklyn thrown up at exact 12.00 PM 10th of April.
2. She put a magic candle on the birthday cake (she didn’t notice). These candles are not the best product idea in the world, but i just can’t put ‘em off. That way i can have more than 1 wish :-D.
3. We don’t go to dinner because usually our little Brooklyn messes up, so instead, we ate rendang and Padang food for breakfast (which kinda hardcore) and super delicious Balinese seafood at Jimbaran beach for lunch.
4. It’s our daughter first experience of sand beach and sea water (we finally took her there). She had a very good fun and we took some very memorable pictures & videos.
5. I tell a story about my birthday in the internet, i put a new category in this blog named ‘Myself’ and I practically take a day off.

So, i celebrate my birthday with my loved ones. I’m so happy.

Below some pictures. Cheers.

Met some mathematicians back at university but none of them have tattoos. Most people i know have tattoos, but somehow, noone has cooler ink than this (sorry my friends… :-D).

Dude i love this guy’s attitude, here’s what he said about his tattoo:

I got the tattoo because I like the idea of math not being well behaved. That sound’s lame and I really don’t mean that in some kind of A is for Anarchy type way. I just think that its kind of nice that something as perfectly fuctional as math can kink up around the edges.

It’s not lame, it’s awesome!

Source.

I never realize that YouTube has been play a great part in my internet life until the site was stupidly blocked for the last 4 days by my ISP. Somehow, the condition developed as more and more people here realize that blocking the site is just overdoing a good idea on paper.

If you live in a country where YouTube has never been blocked, then you don’t know how it feels. It’s a super f**king relieve to gain the access back to the site.

I’m going to celebrate it. This video below is my favorite video from the band Go Motion. The dude who sing (and have a good voice) is my friend. We use to admire each other band back in my music days. Go Motion is cool (so is YouTube :-D).

Today is not a good day, i can’t finish my checklists at work. I noticed that it’s a super simple  recurring administrative tasks. I don’t know why, i just gave up. I decide to turn off my computer and went to take a day nap, and i wonder…

I’m a diehard Manchester United fan (and i blog about them). Yesterday, Manchester United held to a draw by a ‘weaker’ opponent, the club also lose another first choice defender Rio Ferdinand after Nemanja Vidic a week before through tigh injury. The stage of the season is reach to the end, it’s so important to keep the whole team fit to keep the good run. During the Sunday game, i kept telling my wife to move from TV while she feed our daughter. She was like, ‘dude, you look like a beer belly dude who just lost your entire year wage’. I tried not to listen to her but i wonder…

I always have a bad week after Manchester United have a bad game. It’s like, a big heart break and most of the time it feels like it’s the end of the world. The only way to cure the pain is to see the team winning.

I guess i’m addicted to see Manchester United win. However, it’s a sign that i am alive. It’s addicted and it’s so beautiful.

I just hope you addicted to something too!

Image from Wikipedia

I’m a big fan of Evan Dando’s Lemonheads. I play hardcore metal in my music days, but i’m also a big fan of acoustic guitar. Everytime i need songs to play on my acoustic guitar, Lemonheads songs were always my choice to play on the first set of songs i play. However, Lemonheads were just released a Collector Edition set which contains classics like My Drug Buddy (dude i love this song), the cover of Mrs. Robinson plus 10 bonus demo tracks and a DVD contains LIVE Videos and the band having fun. Oh yes you can imagine this, well it might be lazy fun but hey it’s The Lemonheads!

I have yet get the copy but i surely will which also a must to all Lemonheads fans. To remind us to the cool Evan Dando and The Gang, below is a video from classic song It’s a Shame About Ray.

Note: TheProductionSide reminds me of The Lemonheads.

My ISP has yet to block YouTube which must be the stupidest act that an ISP can do. So i would like to take this opportunity to post another cool video uploaded at YouTube.

The video explain what is art from animal perspective. Art?

After several hours effort moving this blog’s host, i was tempted (read: forced) to upgrade to Wordpress 2.5 which was released earlier today. I wouldn’t get into details because you can always find it at many Wordpress dedicated blogs, but to quote from Wordpress Development Blog newest post:

WordPress 2.5, the culmination of six months of work by the WordPress community, people just like you. The improvements in 2.5 are numerous, and almost entirely a result of your feedback: multi-file uploading, one-click plugin upgrades, built-in galleries, customizable dashboard, salted passwords and cookie encryption, media library, a WYSIWYG that doesn’t mess with your code, concurrent post editing protection, full-screen writing, and search that covers posts and pages.

Well. My first impression on the newer version is, well, It’s more ajax-ed based navigation and faster to load. Then i suddenly realized that Wordpress is stating indirectly that they’re no longer traditional Personal Publishing Platform but beyond. Wordpress is a Content Management System. Some tweaks will be needed to make all my and my customers themes and current plugins used to work with the new version, but hey, that’s the fun part of having this new version runs in my blogs.

Congratulation to the Wordpress team.

I do check my Yahoo! email to see how many spams i get, but this time i got ‘an important notice’ from Yahoo!:

We’re making some changes that will affect one of your Yahoo! profiles. After April 9, 2008, mature content will not be permitted within Yahoo! Profiles.

In accordance with this new policy, users will no longer be able to designate an “adult profile,” and mature content will be removed.

The profile for the Yahoo! ID lowrobb is marked “adult.” The picture associated with this profile will be removed and deleted on April 9, 2008.
http://profiles.yahoo.com/lowrobb

I didn’t even remember if i have a Yahoo! profile, so i checked it out and seems like my profile was categorized as ‘adult’. I’m not sure why and perhaps i was idiotically register my profile and add to adult category. But after seeing the profile picture i started to laugh. And can’t stop.

Below is the picture. I have a mustache and wear Batik, a traditional outfit wears by ‘adult’. The next funny thing was that i can’t change the image to a new that might perhaps not categorize as adult. So let it be.

Somehow noone can blame Yahoo! because it’s just another automatic-massive-user-based-generated -announcement on what the system see in their certain category. This is a sort of social outage effect generated by new Indonesian government law that intend to block pornographies in the internet.

Well, all in all, it’s just a nature of the future ‘borderless world’ in Indonesia which i will never comprehend. I think more people especially who rule the rules should dig into internet deeply. That way they’ll understand that internet freedom of speech is far beyond pornography. I wonder what will be next.